LITTLE WILD CHIMPANZEE

When Little Chimp is brand new, a curious Sister Chimp--pushed away by their mother when she comes too close--touches the baby with a long stick: ""The stick was a tool to help her find out what a baby chimp smells like."" After this Michel integrates her research sources a little less obtrusively, with Little Chimp building nests and jumping on them, playing with other chimps and baboons, and copying his sister's practice of removing ants from their nests with a twig. Later, playing with his ""old friend"" (?) Little Baboon, Little Chimp dines on some ants and hands his friend the twig for getting them up--""but baboons do not use tools."" (Do chimps hand them over?) There's an encounter with a leopard before this is over, with other chimpanzees throwing rocks to frighten the predator away. But next-to-beginning readers will find the same material handled with more authority in Alston's Growing Up Chimpanzee (1975)--where, more to the pedagogical point, the chimpanzee strips leaves from a vine to ""make a tool"" for getting termites--and far more engagingly in Teleki and Steffy's Goblin, a Wild Chimpanzee (1977).